ABSTRACT FRITH, JORDAN HARRIS. Constructing Location, One Check-in at a Time: Examining the Practices of Foursquare Users. (Under the direction of Dr. Adriana de Souza e Silva.) This dissertation focuses on the mobile application Foursquare. Foursquare is an example of a location-based social network (LBSN) and currently has 20 million users and is growing quickly. LBSNs are social networking applications that allow people to share their physical location with members of their social network. In addition, Foursquare also features gaming elements and enables people to leave geotagged messages attached to locations. Through an examination of Foursquare that draws from a multidisciplinary body of academic research and interviews performed with Foursquare users, this dissertation sheds light on how location-aware mobile applications can play a significant role in how users navigate spaces and interact with others. Existing research on LBSNs have contributed valuable perspectives on the potential impacts of these applications; however, few of these studies specifically examine Foursquare and even fewer feature qualitative work with users. The few that do feature qualitative examinations of LBSNs typically operate from a Human-Computer Interaction perspective and do not situate their analyses inside the conceptual literature on location-based mobile technologies. This dissertation takes a unique perspective, showing how theory drawn from multiple disciplines can be deployed to understand how people use Foursquare. This work also serves as one of the first large-scale examinations of Foursquare and contributes to the gap in the literature left by the lack of detailed studies of this popular application. The analysis that drove this work is based on three overarching research questions that are drawn from a gap in existing literature: 1. How does the use of mobile applications like Foursquare impact how people relate to the locations they move through and how do individual design elements become a “lens” through which people view their surrounding space? 2. What are the social practices of Foursquare use and how do people use location to present themselves to others? 3. How do people manage the privacy issues that come with sharing their location and what are the micro-practices they use to exert control over their information? Location-based services have been studied from different perspectives in multiple disciplines, and they are an increasingly important object of analysis in academic research. Through the multidisciplinary body of research deployed in this dissertation and empirical work with users, this dissertation contributes to multiple academic fields, including mobilities studies, communication, sociology, human-computer interaction, and computer science. These disciplines are all concerned with the issues of location, sociability, and privacy explored throughout this work, and the findings are reported in way to make them accessible for researchers from diverse backgrounds. The major findings of this study include a detailed analysis of how gaming and social networking elements of Foursquare can affect people’s personal mobility, how the ways people present themselves to others through location shift as people share information with multiple social networks, how the varied understanding of Foursquare as a technological artifact affects how people use it to coordinate with others, and how people adjust to design elements to manage their privacy in newly networked environments. The ultimate conclusion of this work is that Foursquare can impact how people relate to their surrounding space and others in those spaces and that design plays a crucial role in how people manage their privacy when interacting with ubiquitous computing technologies. As more and more people adopt smartphones with location-aware capabilities that run third-party applications like Foursquare, it becomes increasingly important to understand the impact of these applications. This dissertation is an important early step in combining existing theory with qualitative work to fully conceptualize one of the fastest growing mobile applications. © Copyright 2012 by Jordan Frith All Rights Reserved Constructing Location, One Check-in at a Time: Examining the Practices of Foursquare Users by Jordan Harris Frith A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Raleigh, North Carolina 2012 APPROVED BY: _______________________________ ______________________________ Dr. Adriana de Souza e Silva Dr. Steve Wiley Committee Chair ________________________________ ________________________________ Dr. David Berube Dr. Jason Swarts ii BIOGRAPHY Jordan Frith is a faculty member at the University of North-Texas, and his research focuses on social and mobile media. He received his Ph.D in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media from North Carolina State University. He is particularly interested in how people use location-based social networks to coordinate behavior and alter the way they relate to surrounding space. He recently coauthored the book Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces with Adriana de Souza e Silva, and his publications include articles in Mobilities and Communication, Culture, and Critique. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank Adriana for everything. I definitely could not have had a better mentor, and I know that I have been insanely lucky to have the opportunity to work with you. There are not many mentors who are willing to sit down and write a book with a student, and I could not be more appreciative. I also want to thank my other three committee members. Steve, you’ve always challenged my way of thinking on just about everything, and I know it has made me a much better scholar. I still do not always agree with you, but I am much better at articulating my thoughts because of our conversations, and you have definitely changed the way I think and write about media. Berube, working with you for two years exposed me to a totally different research perspective, and I now feel much more comfortable talking to people whose research methods and interests may not perfectly align with mine. Also, I greatly enjoy telling people that their perception of risk is generally terrible. Jason, the independent study I did with you was one of the most intellectually stimulating experiences of this whole process. I could not have enjoyed our discussions of Latour more than I did, and I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to teach that directed readings course. I also now get to use one specific sentence from Heidegger to teach my undergraduates how not to write. And finally, I would like to thank the entire Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program. It has not always been a completely smooth ride, but I know I made the right decision when I came to NC State, and I am proud that I have had the opportunity to see the program grow so much over the last four years. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................ vi LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................................vii Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 The Contribution of My Work .................................................................................................. 6 My Approach to Answering My Research Questions ........................................................... 19 The Structure of My Dissertation ............................................................................................ 22 Section 1: Conceptualizing Foursquare ...................................................................................... 29 Chapter 2: Moving through the City, One Check-in at a Time: LBSNs and Hybrid Spaces . 30 Earlier Mobile Technologies and Physical Space .................................................................. 33 The Hybrid Spaces of the City ................................................................................................ 37 Foursquare tips, the Explore feature, and the presentation of location ............................. 41 Location-based mobile gaming ........................................................................................... 48 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 53 Chapter 3: Collective Mobile Communication and Social Networking Sites .......................... 54 Mobile Communication and Foursquare ................................................................................ 56 Collective mobile communication ...................................................................................... 60 Social Networking Sites........................................................................................................... 66 Maintaining social networks ................................................................................................ 68 The presentation of self........................................................................................................ 73 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................